By Andrew Warshaw
September 27 – When FIFA announced last week that Marco van Basten had been appointed as chief technical officer to help raise coaching standards, there were understandably few dissenting voices.
After all, the former Dutch striker is one of the all-time greats of world football and FIFA president Gianni Infantino made a pointing of welcoming him into the FIFA fold.
As a non-political appointment, with van Basten working alongside former AC Milan teammate Zvonimir Boban – hired by Infantino as deputy general secretary to oversee football matters – there could surely be no adverse publicity over this to add to FIFA’s recent troubles.
Right? Wrong.
He may not admit it now that he is part of the FIFA administration with a job that was too tempting to turn down and prompted his resignation from the Dutch FA, where he was assistant coach of the national team, but only a few months ago van Basten was not exactly very complimentary about where FIFA might go if Infantino was elected president.
In a column for the prestigious Dutch magazine VOETBAL INTERNATIONAL a couple of weeks before the election, van Basten was examining the credentials of the various candidates.
It may make grim reading for the man who was ultimately elected – and who is now van Basten’s boss – but this is what the Dutchman said about Gianni Infantino’s election tactics.
“He suddenly came up with the plan to expand the finals of the World Cup to 40 countries,” wrote van Basten before addressing Infantino’s plan to distribute 5 million dollars every four years to each of FIFA’s federations for football development.
“What for? I can imagine that FIFA wants to help everyone. But ….five million in Germany is different from five million to Togo. Pretty stupid plan”
Perhaps van Basten, who appears to have backed Jerome Champagne for the presidency, no longer remembers what he wrote at the time – or even cares – now that he is on FIFA’s payroll.
No doubt he and Infantino have become bosom buddies but the incident might well be construed as representing yet another disturbing example of duplicity among those in high places.
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